Grant and Lee

It's 150 years since the  Civil War, and yesterday I watched on TV as an ancient southern historian delivered a talk on that conflict. I was struck by one comment this old duffer made, which was that before Grant came east to take charge of the Union army, the two forces, Union and Confederate, had been playing chess; after Grant arrived they played checkers. 

During his lifetime, Grant was the most admired man in  America, more popular even than Lincoln. A negative view of the clash between Grant and Lee developed long after the Civil War as part of a glorification of "The Lost Cause." It's now out of date.

I am no expert, but even I can see that Grant and Lee were not in equal positions. Lee was in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia, one of a handful of separate Confederate armies. He had no control over what Joe Johnston's army was doing in Georgia, for example. This lack of coordination was built into the concept of secession and one reason the North rejected state's rights. Grant was, in 1864, in charge of every soldier in the Union army. Grant had a plan to end the war. If Lee was playing chess, Grant was playing three-dimensional chess.

At the time, most people thought they were smarter than Grant, who was kind of dowdy. Sherman, for example, was absolutely devoted to Grant, a dedicated follower, but he thought he was smarter than Grant. General Grant was one of those creative people who are absolutely brilliant but seem to their contemporaries as merely above average, nothing special. He somehow managed to get the navy to join him in a joint attack on Vicksburg--maybe the first major joint attack in American history. In that same campaign Grant cut loose from his supply line and led his army into Mississippi to forage off the land, the astonishing tactic that later resulted in Sherman's march through Georgia. When Grant was put in charge of the entire army, he sent Sherman to Georgia with instructions to destroy the region's ability to supply the Confederate army with food and manufactured goods (all Grant's plans were worked out with Sherman and Lincoln, but Grant had the last word). Grant sent Gen. Sheridan through the Shenandoah Valley with instructions to destroy the rest of the Confederate food supply. The hard job Grant assigned to himself: keeping Lee and his army occupied, out of the strategic battle, penned up. In the end Lee's army had no food. 

Another way to put it was that Grant was a strategist; Lee, a tactician. Grant, who wore a private's uniform with stars on the shoulders, looked ordinary but wrote the only military memoir by an America general that is taught as literature. His prose was plain and exact. I don't think his reputation needs help from people like me these days. Historians have caught up with him. I'm just struck by how some people can be so much smarter than those around them understand.